Video: Increasing color with Colorize and blending modes

In the next few movies, we're going to look at how we can enhance and change the color of eyes, and we'll start off here with this photograph of my daughter Annie. Let's go ahead and zoom in on this picture of her. You can see she has those big, beautiful, blue eyes, and let's say that what we want to do is we want to enhance the color of the blue. We want to bring out more of the blues. Well, we're going to look at a technique which will use three different adjustment layers. We'll start off by creating our first adjustment layer by simply clicking on the icon for Hue/Saturation.

In this course, photographer, author, and teacher Chris Orwig details the tools every photographer needs to retouch portraits to make them look their best while remaining authentic. The course includes an overview of the retouching process and how to develop a plan for a retouching project.

After exploring techniques to improve the overall photo, Chris shares his techniques for reducing wrinkles, enhancing eyes and other facial features, improving hair, and retouching makeup. The course concludes with a look at retouching skin and reshaping portions of a portrait using transformations, the Warp tool, and the Liquify filter.

Increasing color with Colorize and blending modes

In the next few movies, we're going to look at how we can enhance and changethe color of eyes, and we'll start off here with this photograph of my daughter Annie.Let's go ahead and zoom in on this picture of her.You can see she has those big, beautiful, blue eyes, and let's say that what wewant to do is we want to enhance the color of the blue.We want to bring out more of the blues.Well, we're going to look at a technique which will use threedifferent adjustment layers.We'll start off by creating our first adjustment layer by simply clicking on theicon for Hue/Saturation.

Hue/Saturation allows us to shift Hue, or Saturation, and it also allows us toColorize our photographs.When you click on Colorize, it applies a uniform color to the entire picture.Click on that option, and then what I want you to do is to invert the mask.To invert the mask, you can either press Command+I or Control+I, or if you forgetthat shortcut, click on your mask icon, and then click on this button here: the Invert button.

Well now that we have that, let's select our brush. Let's make sure that wehave a brush without any hardness, and also let's increase the brush size a little bit.Here, we're just going to paint at 100%, and you know, we're using thisexaggerated colorize color here to help us see where our edges are of our overall mask.By having a really bright color, it shows me how I'm doing.I am going to zoom in a little bit, so I can work on the top part of the mask.Here, I'll press the Left Bracket key, and then just paint over this area.

Next, I'll move to the other eye in just a moment here, make the brush a littlebit bigger, and paint through this part of the picture.Press the Left Bracket key to make it smaller, and then paint on the top area here.Right now, you can see that all of the eyes are green.Obviously, I'm not going to change the color to green, yet this exaggeratedcolor really helps me see how this is going to sit on the eyes there.If you want to diminish this, just decrease your Opacity, and then paint withblack, and by doing that, you can kind of paint it away from certain areas.

Sometimes I find this helpful, so that it's not just one color all the way around,at full intensity in each spot. And here I'm just kind of painting over thatsubtly, and it's starting to look a little bit better.Next, what we need to do is to pick the color that we want to work with.Obviously the color is going to need to be less saturated,so we'll desaturate, and then I am going to go for enhancing those blues.So I am going to look to try to find a nice color for the blue here, and again,I'll just experiment with the saturation amount.

When working with eyes we don't want to overdo it.So here's our before, and then now our after.Because if we overdo it, well, it's going to detract from our overall picture.Well, this is step one.What's step two, and step three?One of the things that you can do that I've found, in order to enhance color, isyou can copy your layers, and then use different blending modes.We're going to do this twice.So, on this layer press Command+J or Control+J twice.Now that we have these three layers, let's go ahead and turn off the visibilityof the top layer and work with this second duplicate layer here.

On this layer we're going to change our blending mode to Screen.When we do that, all of a sudden the eyes are going to become really, really bright.Well, obviously, they are too bright here, and I also notice I have a few areas inmy mask that I need to clean up.So I'll go ahead and select the Brush tool here, and I am just going to paintthis away from the lower part of the eye, and also the upper part up there.You just want to do this so that, again, this will look good.Well now that I've painted that away there, the next thing we'll want to do iswe want to decrease the Opacity.

And by being able to control the brightness, it can sometimes help us create an effect that will look better.Now that the eyes are bright, I want to go back to the first adjustment layer,and here, desaturate it a little bit more.So we can see, there is our before; now here's our after.Next step is to click in the topmost layer to turn on the visibility of that layer.With this layer, we are going to change our blending mode to Soft Light.Soft Light will add some really nice contrast, and by having Soft Light on topof the other layers, what it does is, rather than having the eyes lose a littlebit of detail, it brings back some nice contrast, but it's bringing in contrastbased on the color that we're working on.

Here we may decide to decrease our Opacity with this one.We also may want to do that with the Brightness one as well.And by using these three sliders together, and kind of mixing these differentamounts, what we can do is come up with some interesting ways to enhance theoverall color in the eyes.Last but not least, let's group these layers, and then modify the overallOpacity of the group.Click in the bottom layer, hold down the Shift key, then click in the top layer,then press Command+G or Control+G; that's Command+G on a Mac, Control+G on Windows.

We'll name this group eyes.Here, if we click on the eye icon, we can see our before, and then now our after.Next, we can decrease the Opacity here, so that we can then dial in just theexact effect that we want.Last but not least, zoom out a little bit, so that you can see how thisadjustment fits into the overall picture.I think that looks really good.It looks natural, yet the color there is vibrant and alive.

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